Over on The Health Care Blog, John Lumpkin MD posted a good essay about the proposed ONC rules to let patients automatically see their lab test results. The SGIM Forum (newsletter of the Society for General Internal Medicine) ran a debate about it, and Lumpkin comments.
Lumpkin is senior VP and director of Health Care Group at Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, whose Pioneer Portfolio does much good work studying patient engagement, including the OpenNotes project we’ve often discussed here, and they funded the e-Patient White Paper that’s our foundation document.
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Tell your patient, 1. That sometimes, actually many times, that you’ve ignored lab results in the past because you believe it’s wrong (it doesn’t fit the clinical picture) and it’s a waste of time and resource to even explain it or repeat it. 2. At least tell you, the physician that they’ve obtained a copy of the lab result.